John-Paul Sartre
on Paul Nizan

(From
Foreword to Aden, Arabie)

The
error that I want my readers to avoid is one that I made myself. And I made it
during Nizan’s lifetime, notwithstanding the fact that we were such close friends
that people used to mistake us for each other. One day in June of ’39, Léon
Brunschvicg ran into us at the offices of Gallimard and congratulated me on having
written Les Chiens de garde, “. . . although,” as he said without bitterness,
“you were pretty hard on me.” I smiled at him in silence; Nizan stood smiling
beside me. The great idealist left without realizing his mistake. This confusion
between us had been going on for eighteen years—it had become our status in society,
and we had come to accept it. Particularly between 1920 and 1930, when we were
students together at the lycée and then the École Normale, we were indistinguishable.
Nevertheless, I did not see him as he really was.

(p. 18)

What,
in sum, was the cause of his suffering? Why did I, more than all others, sound
ridiculous to him when I talked about our liberty? If he believed, from the time
he was sixteen, in the inexorable chain of causes, it was because he felt constrained
and manipulated: “We have within us divisions, alienations, wars, debates. . .
. Each of us is divided among the men he might be. . . .” A solitary child, he
was too conscious of his uniqueness to throw himself into universal ideas, the
way I did. A slave, he came to philosophy to free himself, and Spinoza furnished
him a model. In the first two types of knowledge, man remains a slave because
he is incomplete; knowledge of the third type breaks down the partitions, the
negative determinants. It is all one, according to this mode, to return to the
infinite substance and to achieve the affirmative totality of one’s particular
essence. Nizan wanted to pull down all walls: he would unify his life by proclaiming
his desires and subduing them.

(pp. 26-27)

We
lost him; he never lost himself. He was tormented by a new abstraction: to run
from one place to another, from one woman to another, is to hold on to nothing.
Aden was Europe compressed, and at white heat. One day Nizan did what his father,
who was still living, had never dared to do. He took an open car and set out at
high noon without a sun helmet. They found him in a ditch, unconscious but unhurt.
This suicide liquidated a few of the old terrors. When be recovered, be looked
around him and saw “the most naked state, the economic state.” Colonies expose
a regime which, in the metropolitan countries, is shrouded in mists. He came back.
He had understood the causes of our servitude. His terror became an aggressive
force: hate. He was no longer fighting against insidious, anonymous infiltrations.
He had seen naked exploitation and oppression, and he had understood that his
adversaries had names and faces, that they were men. Miserable, alienated men,
doubtless, like his father and himself. But men who “defended and preserved their
misery and its causes, with guile, with violence, with obstinacy and skill.” That
night when he came back and knocked at my door, he knew that he had triedeverything,
that his back was to the wall, that all solutions were blind alleys except one:
war. He was coming back among his enemies to fight: “I will no longer be afraid
to hate. I will no longer be ashamed to be fanatic. I owe them the worst: they
all but destroyed me.”

The
end. He found his community and was received into it; it protected him against
his enemies. But since I am introducing him to the young readers of today, I must
answer the question they will not fail to ask: Did he finally find what he was
looking for? What could the Party give to this man who had been skinned alive,
who suffered to the very marrow of his bones from the sickness of death? We must
be scrupulous about asking this question. I am telling the story of an exemplary
life, which is just the opposite of an edifying life. Nizan shed his skin, and
yet the old man, the old young man, remained. From 1929 to 1939 I saw less of
him, but our meetings were all the more lively for being brief, and they taught
me much about him. Nowadays, I understand, one chooses the family as opposed to
politics. Nizan, however, had chosen both. Aeneas had grown weary of carrying
gloomy old Anchises for so long, and with one shrug of the shoulders had sent
him sprawling. Nizan had rushed into marriage and fatherhood in order to kill
his father. But becoming a father is not in itself a sufficient cure for childhood.
On the contrary, the authority vested in the new head of a family condemns him
to repeat the age-old pieces of childishness handed down to us from Adam through
our parents. It was an old story to my friend. He wanted to finish off once and
for all the father who in each generation was murdered by his son only to be reborn
again in him. He would become a different man, and would keep himself from
capricious behavior in the family by public discipline. Let us see if he succeeded.

The
doctrine satisfied him completely. He detested conciliations and conciliators,
and most especially their Great Master, Leibnitz. When he was required to study
the Discourse on Metaphysics in school, he took his revenge by making a
talented drawing of the philosopher in full flight, wearing a Tyrolean hat, with
the imprint of Spinoza’s boot on his right buttock. To pass from the Ethics
to Das Kapital, however, was easy. Marxism became his second nature
or, if you prefer, his Reason. His eyes were Marxist, and his ears. And his head.
At last he understood his incomprehensible wretchedness, his wants, his terror.
He saw the world and saw himself in it. But above all, at the same time that Marxism
made his hatreds legitimate, it reconciled in him the opposing discourse of his
parents. The rigor of technique, the exactitude of science, the patience of reason,
all that was retained. But the doctrine also went beyond the pettiness of positivism,
with its absurd refusal to “know through causes.” The dreary world of means, and
of the means of means, was left to the engineers. To the troubled young man who
wanted to save his soul, Marxism offered absolute ends: play midwife to history,
bring forth the revolution, prepare Man and the Reign of Man. The doctrine did
not concern itself with salvation or personal immortality, but it gave him the
chance to live on, anonymously or gloriously, in the midst of a common enterprise
that would end only with the species. He put everything into Marxism: physics
and metaphysics, his passion for action and his passion for retrieving his acts,
his cynicism and his eschatological dreams. Man was his future. But now was the
time to slash. It would be up to other men to sew the pieces together again. His
was the pleasure of cheerfully ripping everything to shreds for the good of humanity.

(pp.
42-44)

SOURCE: Sartre, Jean-Paul.
Foreword to Aden, Arabie by Paul Nizan; translated from the French by Joan
Pinkham. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. (French original published
1960, English translation published 1968).

Simone de
Beauvoir, Nizan, & Sartre

Nizan specialized in
portraits of Leibniz, whom he preferred to depict as a priest, or wearing a Tyrolean
hat, and bearing on his backside the imprint of Spinozas hoof.

[Gerassi:]
But you were in the same class, listening to the same lecturer, you didnt
need to be introduced? You couldnt go up to her and say, What did you think
of [Gottfried] Leibniz? I mention Leibniz because you apparently drew him “in
bed with the monads and gave it to her. Didnt she thank you? Didnt
that start a conversation?

She knew from Maheu that Sartre wanted to meet her. He would have
introduced them one day in the Luxembourg Gardens, he said, but she was with another
student at the time, and he did not want to disturb her meditations.
Sartre tried an indirect approach. He hoped to interest and amuse her by dedicating
a drawing to her: he called it Leibniz bathing with the Monads. He
did not send it but gave it to Maheu to give to her. She did not record her response.
She remembered that Sartre and Nizan had issued a cordial invitation
to her, hoping that all four of them could meet.


Margaret Crosland, Simone de Beauvoir: The Woman and Her Work (London:
Heinemann, 1992), p. 68.